This invention relates to a word recognition apparatus capable of retrieving a word which is most similar to a character string read out by an optical character recognition (OCR) system by the use of a dictionary of words, and more particularly to a word recognition apparatus for use in improving the reading capability of an address read from a postal matter through the OCR system.
The aforesaid character recognition system is well-known. For example, reference is made to Pages 129 to 146 of the text by George L. Fisher, Jr., et al. entitled, Optical Character Recognition, published by Spartan Books, McGregor & Werner Inc., in 1962. Hitherto, it has been proposed to correct at a word level a character string, recognized in the character recognition system, by using a dictionary. The use of a dictionary, however, has the disadvantage of requiring a very large memory capacity in the case where the number or words to be stored in the dictionary is great. A far greater shortcoming of this approach is that many processing hours are required. No proposals have been made for the solution of this problem except for a very brief description given on Pages 397 to 403 in a paper by Edward M. Riseman et al entitled "Contextual Word Recognition Using Binary Diagrams" published in IEEE Transactions On Computers, April, 1971, whereby words within a block (in a dictionary) having the same character number as that of characters in a character string to be generated from the character recognition system are searched so as to select a word which most matches the character string. However, as the number of words having the same character number becomes greater, the adoption of this approach results in too many processing hours which is a great disadvantage.